天下制覇

Luckily, villains are patient.

Impressions:

Really? The power of freindship saves him, then he just starts fusing things all will nilly while Yamato patiently stares in shock until Lucifer of all things saves the day. Don’t let the mothers groups hear about that one. Yada yada. Flashbacks. The world resets. Everyone’s alive again. Most remember nothing. Io’s boobs I think get even perkier. More flashbacks. Seriously though, I think they were pointing upward during a few shots in the subway scene in utter defiance of gravity. I assume that it wasn’t just recycled footage from the first episode, but I barely remember things that happened a week ago. It very well could have been. I admit it unabashedly, I checked out of this episode sometime around the minute or so long fusion dance. I didn’t even remember some of the characters they showed in the montage at the end.

But thank god Hibiki broke down weeping in joy at the end that Yamato was okay. Because isn’t that the true theme of the story? His friendship with Yamato? Clearly. Thank god it’s only four days until next season.

Final Thoughts:

A lot of it sounds good on paper. The animation is usually pretty decent, it kills named characters like it’s snarfing down popcorn, the plot keeps moving… but the execution was always just a bit off. Too much exposition when they needed to be making the audience care about the characters, the main characters were useless or worse, comic relief while everyone else was putting on their best grim faces during armageddon, and it just got more and more rushed in all the wrong ways. They kept trying to ramp things up with the monsters and deaths, but it all got far too big and impersonal for any of it to have any impact, not to mention that they kept winning by instant kill asspulls every time, to say nothing of the monster in the middle that was defeated by dancing and flashing a navel. All of that suffocating under the weight of exposition and centering on a main character who only lost any inkling of personality he may have once had as the show went on. Putting on the emo bunny hoodie was probably the height of his existence.

It probably could have been passable if the characters were at all memorable, or any of their deaths besides the very first one were accompanied by anything more than a noncommital shrug before they were forgotten. Most of the characters in the show, main characters included, could have simply been replaced by a hat on a stick and nothing would have changed except there’d be less exposition. Maybe a little melodrama instead of philosophizing would have helped. I want to murder Valvrave’s cast, but at least I feel something for them. I’m really not entirely sure. I don’t think it was that terrible, and is above average as far as an action show remembering to have occasional fight scenes goes, but the repetition of structure, lack of caring any of the cast had about each other, and reset ending that was obvious with nearly a third of the show to go even if you hadn’t played the game makes it hard to feel much of anything for the cast or what happens in them, and there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.